​“What’s the point of learning Greek language in the seminary and we don’t actually use them once we enter the pastoral ministry?”

“What’s the point of memorising all the paradigms where we will surely forget them?”

“We memorise the vocabulary, but only to pass the quizzes and exams.”

​I have heard all these before, and I must confess I am also a product of learning Greek by memorising all the vocabulary, all the different paradigms for the different parts of speech, the various unusual verbal forms, and the numerous grammar rules. This was expected as I attended a seminary that places heavy emphasis on biblical languages. Since my area of concentration was in the New Testament, I took Basic Greek, Intermediate Greek, and also Advanced Greek. In addition, I also took an additional course working the different literary styles in the Greek language. Although I wish I could read Greek fluently and able to do parsing on the spot, sadly I must confess this has not always been the case for me.

​When an opportunity arose last year for me to consider teaching Greek, I pondered hard. I had never taught Greek before as this course has always been taught by my other colleagues in the seminary. (When you have a colleague who married a Greek wife, you just have to let him teach Greek as he would have known the language better, right!) I struggled how I could approach the subject and teach it well so that the students would be able to appreciate the language and continue to use it even after graduating from seminary.

Should I make them memorise all the vocabulary, paradigms, and rules? If not, how can they pick up their NA28 and read it fluently and well? If they could get all the memorisation right, and could even score an A, does this mean that they have a full grasp of the language? With the availability of excellent Bible software such as Accordance and BibleWorks, do we still need to memorise all the parsing? Shouldn’t we just let the software do the job?

​After considering all options, I decided to do something rather radical – at least radical in the sense that this has not been done here. My premise is this: since the advent of a calculator, one does not really need to memorise all the mathematical table anymore. Worse, who remembers how to use an abacus these days? (Well, I learned how to use the abacus when I was in primary school and treated it as a little “angklung” when I could not get my mathematical calculation right. Might as well make some music out of it, much to the despair of my teacher).

So with the availability of software, can we not let the software guide us in our reading of the Greek New Testament, let the software do the parsing for us, and then we do what the software cannot do, i.e., the analysis and exegesis of the Greek language? In other words, do we still need to memorise all the different paradigms?

I know that by doing this, I could imagine my own seminary professors and other friends screaming at me disapprovingly. Many would argue that one won’t be able to learn a language properly by using software. One won’t be able to master the language as one is not even familiar with the vocabulary!

After carefully considering all these, I decided to give this approach a try: What I did was to require all the students to purchase Accordance software (and I hope Accordance would have something special for a small seminary with limited resources from the Majority World, even when the bulk purchase means that there are less than 10) or use whatever software they are currently using. Then I would go through all the usual lectures based on Mounce’s grammar. The only different is that I don’t require the students to memorise all the paradigms except the full paradigm for the articles (since the case endings of the articles would almost be similar to all the case endings for nouns and adjectives). I would still go through the usual functions of the different parts of speech. The only difference is that I started the students reading New Testament Greek early by using Accordance.

As we read parts of 1 John and sample of writings from the Gospels and Paul’s letters, I would ask the students all the usual questions: how to identity the subject, object, prepositional phrase, relative clauses, the antecedent of the pronouns, etc, and then we will carry out the exegesis on the text. I would often highlight questions like why the verb is placed at the end of the sentence or why there is an unusual word order and its significance. In other words, we are still doing what we would usually do in a typical Greek class, minus all the memorisation. The key difference is that we begin to read the New Testament early on in the class rather than wait till much later, which is quite typical in most Greek language courses. By doing so, I could highlight some other difficult issues of the grammar along the way (and with the hope that I would not confuse the students). Then we would compare the various English, Chinese and Malay language translations. That’s the benefit of teaching in a multi-cultural setting where we have students who know a number of languages and we could see the difficulties in Bible translations immediately where often times, the nuances in Greek would be almost impossible to be translated into other languages.

​Does this work? Well, it is almost the end of the first semester for our students. Today, they are having their Greek exam. I really do not know what the outcome would be. Would they have a better grasp of the language? Have they learned well? Would this method be more beneficial for the students? I guess only time will tell.

I wish all the students well in their exam. Most of them will not continue to take Greek in the next semester as it is no longer required for some of them. I hope you all would have appreciated Greek, and continue to use it in your ministry and life later on, of course, with the assistance from Accordance.

Very interesting method and definitely more applied since we all will use bible software or are already using now. Currently I use Olive Tree for reading with commentaries & dictionaries, which is excellent. However it is weak in Greek / Hebrew features. I'd used Logos Bible and am quite impressed with the features although I have not really learnt to use all the features (for Hebrews). But that was for just a short period.

I use the Strong's Bible feature in the Olive Tree more for looking up the word root (definitely not parsing) when I'm curious about the root. Software definitely is a time-saver and is the way to go!

Fascinating post. I’d be interested in knowing what the results were. How did the students perform on their exam? Are you using the same approach in the Fall Semester? What were the thoughts of the students regarding the use of Accordance?

Rick Mansfield
Technology Evangelist
Accordance Bible Software

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I am a Lecturer in New Testament Studies and also an ordained minister. You can find out more about me by clicking here.

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My engagement in conversation with issues, reflections, and concerns related to my vocation as a seminary lecturer and theological education in general. Opinions expressed in this blog are strictly my personal views and do not represent the official position of the seminary